I Never Met a Morphosis I Didn't Like / Smoke Dreams

Two British comic drawings (c1890s)

As I was growing up, adults used to discourage boys from smoking by saying, "Don't smoke or you'll turn into a cigarette." I never quite knew what that meant. But it was an ancient admonition, of the sort that I grew up on. I confirmed that about ten years ago, when I ran across a Victorian-era cartoon (it's the bottom row in the image above) in which (left to right) a smoking Cub Scout turns into a cigarette. Aha! Exactly as anticipated.

More recently, maybe ten days ago, I ran across another (no doubt British) cartoon, as seen in the upper row, in which a man (not a boy it seems) also becomes a cigarette. It even had a title that read THE EVOLUTION OF A CIGARETTE. No doubt a poke at Charles Darwin.

To me, these are of additional interest because they are Darwin-era examples of comic metamorphosis, which is of considerable interest. I have sometimes tried to write about that subject, not very successfully, and as recently as earlier this year, I gave an online talk about it, titled I Never Met a Morphosis I Didn't Like, as seen in the title slide below.

One might also benefit from my video on varieties of creativity, which is free to view online.

a slide talk on metamorphosis / Roy R. Behrens c2025

The gift of seeing resemblances

Jacky Bowring, “Revealing Concealment: The Strange Case of the MoMA Roof Garden” in Thresholds (MIT Press). Fall 2005, p. 17—

Camouflage and mimicry are predicated on concepts of simulation and resemblance, and the desire to produce and discern likeness is ingrained in human experience. In his 1933 essay, “On the Mimetic Faculty“ Walter Benjamin aligned mimetic imitation, or mimicry, with all of the “higher functions” of humanity, and pointed to a time when the “law of similarity” governed life, ruling both “microcosm and macrocosm.” Benjamin conceived of mimesis as a powerful impulse, and a desire to assimilate the self into the other, a social practice, as a foundation for art and language, stating, “nature creates similarities. One need only think of mimicry. The highest capacity for producing similarities, however, is man’s. His gift of seeing resemblances is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else. Perhaps there is none of his higher functions in which his mimetic faculty does not play a decisive role.”

Horsehead / Mole and Thomas

RELATED LINKS
The Living Photographs of Mole and Thomas
Mimicry, Metaphor, and Mistake
Embedded Figures in Art, Architecture and Design
Khaki to Khaki (dust to dust): The ubiquity of camouflage in human experience
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